Category: Home Router

This is the fourth blog post about my home network improvements series. I am sorry it is taking me so long to write all those posts, but each takes a lot of hours to write and I am balancing my life more towards family at the moment. I hope you can bear with me until the end.

Walls need to adapt to their environment

In the previous post, we presented installed the OS and set up networking and routing.

We will now see how to add another very important feature the firewall.

Extra services (to be published, could be splitted in more than one post)

So today’s post will present a simple but secure firewall installation.

As I have said in a previous article, I want to try out nftables instead of using iptables. But we will continue iterating on the previous post and use iptables instead one more time. I want to have a working router and then I can think of switching to nftables and solving integration with other tools.

A Basic Firewall

Firewall

We will use iptables command line to populate the firewall rules. As changing those rules from the command line is not persistent, a simple reboot will restore your OS in the previous configuration so if things do not workout or if we get locked out by a wrong rule, just reboot and restart to setup your firewall. Once we will be happy with the firewall, we will save the rule set and make it permanent.

For rules, we obviously do not want any traffic coming from the WAN to establish new connections inside our LAN or on our router. Only established connections should be allowed through, e.g. an HTTP response is allowed through the firewall so that we can browse the internet. We want some network services to still function, like ICMP or DNS messages to pass through the firewall. We do not want to filter the outgoing traffic for the moment, so everything from the LAN is allowed to reach the WAN.

I like to set default policies for the different iptables chains instead of relying on the last rule to do the policy for me. However, in order to avoid getting locked out, we will set those policies at the very end and always start by defining what is allowed. In order to define our firewall, we will work first with the main chains of the filter table (the default one). Mostly caring of incoming packets and IP forwarding rules.

Extra services (to be published, could be splitted in more than one post)

So today’s post will present in order:

OS installation

Network interfaces configuration

Discussion on what is routing, with activation of packet forwarding, Network Address Translation (NAT) and IP Masquerading

For some items we will see today, we will start with basic functionalities that we will improve or iterate in subsequent posts. As I have said in a previous article, I want to try out nftables instead of using iptables. But many tools I would like to use to quickly create a router are still only supporting iptables as backend, and you cannot mix iptables and nftables. Such tools include systemd-networkd, Docker, or the version of firewalld which Ubuntu is currently supporting (note that firewalld version 0.6+ does support nftables as a backend). So in this first iteration and in order to relatively quickly create a basic router, we will use mostly iptables either through systemd-networkd support or via other tools.

Therefore, we will now see how to build a router from scratch based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I will only configure it for IPv4 as currently my ISP provides only IPv4 connectivity. I am currently planning a series of several posts including that one, I will update that list along the newer articles:

Router features list (this post)

Creating a basic router (to be published, could be splitted in more than one post)

Extra services (to be published, could too be splitted in more than one post)

Disclaimer: I am not a security engineer, although I am very familiar with many aspects of security and security analysis. I am also not a network engineer, although I am very knowledgeable in network protocols, network programming and network security. This article is an exercise for me to see how far I can build a router for SOHO purpose. I make no warranty that it works as intended, nor that I will maintain this article to keep it up to date with respect to network technology and threats. Use at your own risk.

Note: I am mostly going to avoid using any Ubuntu specific tools but of course some will be unavoidable (e.g. network IP address configuration). So this guide should apply to other Linux distributions. Of course there will be some adaptations to do, especially with respect to configuring the network interfaces as there are so many different tools to do that.

Currently my home network is pretty simple … at least for a computer scientist!

Gateway Appliance – License CC BY-SA by Cuda-mwolfe

My ISP provided an all-in-one box with TV, landline and network router. The latter being very limited and with a crap WiFi access point (AP). So I’ve been using my old Asus RT-AC68U router as a gateway, a 24 ports switch and a Ubiquiti Unifi AP for providing WiFi in the complete house (and garden). The router and switch went into the basement whereas I’ve placed the AP roughly in the house centre. The ISP box could not be configured as bridge but supported to set a DMZ host, so I’ve configure the Asus router to be the DMZ.